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Reality: Transforming USC Film Students’ Freshman Year Into an Addictive Game

scott — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 17:14:09 +0000

originally from argnet

December 29, 2011 · By Nathan Maton in Features, Interviews

Image courtesy of Ben Chance

By Nathan Maton and Rebecca Thomas

School changed this year for the majority of freshman at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. Driven, talented future media makers normally waited until their sophomore year to produce any major media through the program, but this year USC partnered with Ph.D. candidate Jeff Watson to produce Reality, an alternate reality game focused on media creation.

Reality, which just completed its first season, is one part trading card game, one part media creation tool, and one part web portal. Three hundred unique cards, color-coded by type and designed to fit together, were handed out to students who unraveled a series of clues leading to the game’s secret campus headquarters or tucked away for discovery as the game progressed. As students discovered other students who were playing, they made “deals” by trading or pooling cards that led to collaborative projects and then published their work to Reality’s web portal so other students could rate and review the projects. Winning projects earned interesting rewards, like meeting industry professionals, for the creators.

Designing Reality
When USC pulled together a team to design Reality, they had one goal in mind: to give incoming freshmen the opportunity to collaborate with other students and sharpen their skills before their sophomore year. Watson was approached for the project because his dissertation is on transmedia interaction design. He put together a team with Simon Wiscombe, with Tracy Fullerton as an advisor.

Watson didn’t want students to feel like they had to join the game. Designed as an alternate reality game, Watson felt that students had to come to the game driven by their own curiosity for it to be truly successful, thus the typical ARG mysterious message that pulls players into the game world. Here’s how students describe their initiation into the game:

“When I started playing the game, I was eating dinner with a friend and she got a call from another friend of mine asking her to come to Fluor Tower,” says Ben Chance, a Film & Television Production major and one of the most active players. “My friend asked if I could come because I was sitting there. There was a pause. After a moment, I was told I could come. We were told we were going to a secret meeting. We came into the room and there were 8 people there and they all had their cards on the floor. I remember telling my friend, ‘This semester just got a whole lot more interesting.’”

“I remember getting a text from my friend Miranda Due,” recalls Allison Tate-Cortese, another Film & Television Production major. ”She had gotten an email from Reality (an email address she didn’t know). It had a cryptic message saying that if you can decode this email, it would tell you where to go for further instructions. It had a bunch of jumbled letters at the bottom. I was pretty shocked off the bat, it was out of the blue and came in a few days before class started.”

Team Formation
One interesting aspect of the slow uptake of the game (as intentionally hoped for) was the ability of those early adaptors to game the system.

“One of the things that helped get me into USC is that I’m a motivated person around challenges so when a challenge was presented to beat out other freshman students in the production of visual media it sounded like a lot of fun,” noted Chance. ”We formed a group of ten people early on and that was unheard of, other groups were getting together in twos and threes. One of my friends, Josh Rappaport, asked if I knew about the game and when I said yeah I’m in a group of 10 people he was shocked. He only knew about 4 or 5 other people playing the game so when he heard about a group of 10 other people playing the game that was unheard of.”

These early adopters dubbed themselves Marra and created an “exclusivity contract” to ensure all members participating in a challenge would get credited for the project. It became impossible for other players to beat this collective force and created some real heat between freshmen. The prizes for the game included things like class recognition, exclusive meetings with top professionals like Robert Zemeckis and famous Hollywood producers: one student even walked away with an internship offer based on the meeting.

Eventually, a rival group formed called the Tribe. While we didn’t talk to a Tribe player, Tate-Cortese, one of Marra’s members, described the Tribe’s rationale as “there are more students outside of Mara than within so why don’t we compete with that and use our massive amount of people to compete.” It worked. Before the Tribe’s formation, Marra won five weeks in a row. Once The Tribe started working together, they won five weeks in a row.

After this rivalry, a resolution emerged as a “forbidden deal.” “About week eight [of the rivalry] maybe, there were three Mara members working on a deal,” Chance explained. “Across the hall, all the Tribe members invited us into a meeting and we observed them and talked to them about what we wanted. One of the members threw out the idea of doing a ‘super project.’” The idea stuck. Chance got intrigued about a Romeo and Juliet style deal and they shot a cross-team deal, uniting the teams for the first time.

Prototyping Challenges
While gameplay of this nature is emergent, it is worth examining why the designers made the decisions to include elements like forced collaboration that led to this type of group deal making.

“Our initial design didn’t have cards at all,” noted Watson. ”It was much more like something like SF0 –a collaborative production game played through a web portal, full stop.” Fullerton, Watson’s advisor on the project, pressed for more. As she explained,

From the beginning, the primary goal of the project was to get students talking, working, and forming lasting social bonds amongst the various divisions of the school . . . . The fact is that some students are more online-focused than others, and we didn’t want to make something that privileged that way of interacting. A face-to-face mechanic, that prompted casual discussion and ramped up to collaboration was what was needed.

Watson had been toying with an interlocking card game system for years, and that became the basis for the revised design. The initial deck design featured media artifact cards as well as action cards that would direct the making, but that still wasn’t flexible enough for what the team wanted. Finally, the team designed a deck carefully balanced between four types of cards: Maker, Property, Special, and People. The cards were flexible enough to provide the type of random prompt generation the design team wanted while still remaining portable enough to facilitate the face-to-face interactions necessary to the game’s success. After the team developed the game’s mechanics on a collaborative wiki and creating a set of test cards, Wiscombe helped refine the experience and translate it into a fleshed-out deck of cards.

Watson gave one example of the reasoning behind the team’s card design decisions. They wanted everyone to start with fairly different cards so they could discover, trade, and share new cards by talking to other players. ”If everyone had the same 10 cards in their starter pack, players wouldn’t be curious about what other players had in their packs . . . so we looked at the approximate size of what we expected would be our start-up player base — we designed for around 200 players — and then did the math from there.”

The team got to know their target audience extremely well, and adjusted the design accordingly. As Watson explains,

There’s a temptation in designing games for institutional interventions that says you should make your game maximally scalable such that other institutions can easily port it into their programs. In my experience, designing for scale from the start depersonalizes and flattens games. Our mandate was to make something that would intrigue, galvanize, and mobilize our players, and we felt that the best way to do this was to create a genuinely tailor-made experience, something that couldn’t happen anywhere else and that was precisely tuned to this particular player population. That was our priority.”

Despite the team’s focus on crafting a project particular to the USC School of Cinematic Arts, their game produced quite a few mechanics that could be readily transferable, including the way the cards link to a web-based collaborative production game.

Of course, design processes are never ideal. The beginning of the semester quickly approached and the team needed to playtest the system with limited time. They were able to bring in members of alocal pervasive gaming group to help test the mechanics and make sure they were headed in the right direction. In the end, the inaugural season of Reality proved to be its real playtest beyond figuring out the mechanics.

Design Philosophy
At its heart, Watson made something quite different from many ARGs. Even with a background in making traditional story-driven ARGs, he finds the mantra, “It’s all about the story” to be counter-productive. ”Design your ARG experiences so that they function procedurally — that is, create an actual game that drives participation and play among your audience such that the play itself generates the experience,” Watson argues. ”In our case, we had a lot of eager young media-makers to work with, and so we were able to leverage their creative and performative motivations in order to generate the overall experience.” This seems like a much needed perspective change, focusing on the mechanic and using the story as an impetus for gameplay. Watson allowed the players to tell their own more meaningful story about personal ambition and competition and collaboration.

What’s Next
It sounds like Reality will return again if student sentiment is any signal. The two students we spoke with both admitted that Reality was their favorite part of their freshman fall semester. They are sad to see it go, and are excited to be a part of the next iteration (even if it is just talking to next year’s freshman about the experience). Beyond the sheer fun, Tate-Cortese found the game to be an exceptional learning experience. “I think the game was brilliant because it created an incredible space for experimentation and growth. It was brilliant because you felt safe because you can try things that were outside of your comfort zone, but you didn’t have to worry about a grade accompanied with it.” She wants to be a director, but got to experiment in all of the different roles in a production.

“Everyone I spoke to in the upper classes wishes they had this experience,” Tate-Cortese said. “It speaks to the future of education and film production, and it just really proves that they are cutting edge and at the forefront of film production and education.” It also allowed for several students outside of SCA to participate in the production process and Chance thinks they are even better equipped to be SCA students (many of them want to transfer) than the SCA students who didn’t participate in Reality.

Interested in learning more about the projects the students created as a result of Reality? Check out the game’s online archive of deals, where students shared their work, explaining the rationale behind each project. Highlights include a special effects-ridden science fiction trailer, a satiric dramatization of students’ experiences with the project, and a game of live-action Minesweeper at IndieCade. A stealth version of the game played out at DIY Days resulted in two additional video productions. Henry Jenkins wrote two blog posts explaining and contextualizing the game within the education space, while the Workbook Project’s Transmedia Talk podcast featured an interview with Watson.

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Alternate Reality Games: Good for Business?

scott — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 19:41:58 +0000

A Good article that I found over at: MattShaw’s Blog. You should check out some of his other stuff.

Every so often you come across one of those strokes of brilliance that makes you ask the really important questions: Is there another way of doing things? Is everything I know about XYZ-topic completely wrong? Why aren’t we all doing this? (And, of course, why didn’t I think of that?)

Recently I came across one such idea. HubSpot, thought leadersextraordinaires in the inbound marketing realm, recently became the first B2B business ever to launch an Alternate Reality Game (ARG) to promote their products.

The premise is simple: HubSpot invented a company, Kronus Media, and told all of their followers that Kronus had issued a Cease & Desist order that forced HubSpot to shut down inboundmarketing.com, their thought leadership arm. The same day, HubSpot launched a Ning network — captaininbound.ning.com — dedicated to solving the mystery behind the evil Kronus Media and their motivations, and eventually to get inboundmarketing.com back up and running. To solve the mystery, the proprietor of the network (who goes by the name “Captain Inbound” to protect him/herself from violating a non-disclosure agreement) points out “clues” left on HubSpot’s various social media sites and asks people for help figuring out what they might mean.

Here’s why this is brilliant:

It’s instantly engaging. The Inbound Marketing University is shut down?! How could they do something like that?!
It requires subscription. Part of the fun of the game is discovering clues. Where are these clues? On HubSpot’s Facebook page, in their Twitter updates, on their blog, etc. In order to find these clues, you have to be actively monitoring HubSpot’s social media accounts.
It promotes followers. There is tremendous incentive to be an active part of a game like this for several reasons. First, it’s reasonably high-profile, which means that there are lots of eyeballs scanning your content. Second, participating in — never mind winning — the game gives you a chance to show off your analytical skills. And third, it levels the playing field for exposure. Anyone can find a clue, anyone can solve a riddle, and anyone can win the game. So why wouldn’t you participate?
It promotes an ideology. The very nature of this game is to pit those people interested in the Inbound Marketing University — who are, for the most part, modern and forward-thinking marketers — against Kronus Media, a company that represents the exact ideology against which Inbound Marketing rebels. The success of HubSpot as a company revolves around their ability to make people understand that this dichotomy exists, and that HubSpot’s side is the side to be on. This game helps to reinforce that idea.
It creates a positive sentiment. I don’t know what this game will do to drive business for HubSpot — I’m thinking it won’t drive much, but that’s me being skeptical. To be honest, though, I don’t know that HubSpot is thinking about this game in terms of ROI. Any return that they’ll get from this game will be entirely metaphysical in nature. There is an unspoken value in the number of times someone says, “Hey, did you hear about that cool game that HubSpot’s running?” To have the words “cool” and “HubSpot” in the same sentence, multiplied by a couple of thousand, adds up to the kind of achievement that they probably couldn’t have accomplished otherwise.
It happens in a natural environment. HubSpot isn’t asking you log into some third-party website to access the game. You don’t have to download anything, you’re not using some kind of game widget. You’re doing things that you were probably already doing: interacting with HubSpot on their blog and on Twitter and Facebook. You already do that (or if you don’t, it’s really easy to start doing it). So there’s no barrier to entry.

There are a lot of people who were upset about the way HubSpot launched the game. I’d like to address some of those concerns on Monday, if you’ll give me the weekend. In the mean time, tell me what you think about www.captaininbound.com — A cool game or a spectacular failure?

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Iron Man 2 Alternate Reality Game

scott — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 23:08:06 +0000

So, it looks like Iron Man 2 is joining the ARG movement. The rabbithole for this appears to have been a Stark Industries recruiter wandering around Comic-con. Here’s a link to what was on the business cards she was handing out. This will take you to the website: www.starkindustriesnow.com which has a letter from “Tony” and a link to apply for employment with Stark Industries. Some of the questions are fairly stereotypical like employment history, but others like this: “What term describes the superposition of two or more waves resulting in a new wave pattern?” are a little trickier. I applied, but have yet to receive anything, maybe I didn’t get the physics questions rights… In addition, several ‘news articles’ have been released: link and here. The best people can do is look at what words are darkened, and the clipping below of the man walking on air. Is it related? This is definitely generating some buzz, but from an ARG perspective, a LOT of people are scratching their heads trying to figure what the clues mean and what to do with them. If anybody has any clue please drop me a line, in the meantime we can memorize what’s been released and hopefully a new clue will emerge that we will lead us in the right direction besides in circles…?

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Slideshare on Alternate Reality Games

admin — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 20:34:45 +0000

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Alternate Reality Gaming

scott — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 17:56:54 +0000

Great article that summarizes ARGs, found here.

In July, Logan received a notebook in the mail, along with news that his friend Matt Selby had committed suicide. Logan started posting pictures of the notebook’s pages to his blog, attempting to decipher its meaning. But in September, Logan disappeared, and now his friends are all trying to find him. There’s only one problem: Neither Logan nor his friends exist.

They’re characters in the Alternate Reality Game Just Another Fool. Alternate Reality Games, or ARGs, blur the lines between reality and the game by telling the stories through various on- and off-line media, such as websites, social networks, mail, video, phone calls, and even real-life events. The players have to solve puzzles contained in these media in order to advance the story.

The Future of Entertainment

ARGs started out as a form of viral marketing for various products. The first big ARG was The Beast, set in the fictional world of the movie “A.I.” There have been highly successful ARGs for movies like “The Dark Knight,” “District 9,” and “Pirates of the Caribbean.” One of the most famous ARGs was called “IloveBees,” which was a promotion campaign for the massively popular video game “Halo 2.” Even though these ARGs were essentially giant advertisements, the players still found them incredibly entertaining.

“If a ‘Halo’ fan hears about an ARG about ‘Halo’ or a ‘Terminator’ fan hears about the [‘Sarah Connor Chronicles’] ARG, they would jump at the opportunity to participate in a story,” said Tyler Parrott, a first year student at Colby College, who has been playing ARGs for over three years. “ARGs have gotten me in touch with some incredible stories. Enitech got me watching [‘Sarah Connor Chronicles’] and now I love the series.”

Steve Peters, who has been developing ARGs professionally since 2005, sees ARGs as a new art form. Peters is the Chief Experience Architect for No Mimes Media and has worked on ARGs for “The Dark Knight” and “Pirates of the Caribbean.” “What hooked me was when the game called me while I was at lunch,” Peters said. “It’s the future of entertainment.” In recent months, there has been an explosion of grassroots ARGs run by fans, for fans. These “unofficial” ARGs have met differing levels of success. This is largely due to the fact that the people working behind the scenes, known as “Puppetmasters” in the ARG community, are required to balance the game with real-life obligations.

On the Unfiction.com forums, the largest online ARG community, these grassroots campaigns now outnumber the “official” games 2-to-1, and they have a comparable number of players. “ARGs sort of blur the line between creator [and his or her] characters and the players in a way,” Regina Erbs, a webmaster from Lima, Ohio said. “Being a part of the action is a lot of fun.”

Riddle Me This, Riddle Me That

When “Logan” disappeared, his friend Joshua hacked into his blog and started updating on how the search was going. Following Logan’s advice, he got rid of the notebook by mailing it to Tyler Parrott, .

Parrott then posted a YouTube video of the notebook’s pages. That was when Erbs spotted a pattern of numbers that turned out to be a phone number. When players called it, they heard “Logan.” Using the information he gave them, they were able to correctly answer a riddle, and the players were each sent pages of a new notebook. It was through their teamwork that they were able to advance the story.

“Ultimately, the main pull is the interactivity, the challenging puzzles, and the community that forms as a result of these games,” Parrott said. Parrott, who goes by the online persona of Dav Flamerock, is a community leader on the Unfiction forums, and a highly prominent player of the fan-created “Just Another Fool.”

Online Family, For Better or For Worse

According to Parrott, the large interest in these games is due to the player community’s involvement in the story. “I have made some amazing friends through these games,” Parrott said. These games are simply impossible to play by yourself, according to Erbs. The community is all-important to figuring out riddles and advancing the story. “So much of these games are about sharing information,” Erbs said. “If Dav hadn’t posted the video of the first notebook, he might not have noticed there was a phone number hidden in it.”

But it’s not all roses and butterflies. The community can create problems as well, particularly in grassroots ARGs. The stories are often inspired by conversations on other forum sites like SomethingAwful.com, which is where “Just Another Fool” and a related ARG, “Marble Hornets”, started. Because these games start in public forums, there tends to be a lot of what ARG players call “gamejacking,” which is when people who aren’t playing the game attempt to divert the course of the story by pretending to be characters.

When Peters was running a game for Cisco Systems, Inc., they created profiles for several of the game characters on LinkedIn.com. Someone attempted to “gamejack” them by creating a profile on LinkedIn.com, claiming to work at the same fictional company. This person then sent puzzles to players while claiming to be an official part of the game. But despite these annoyances, most players still find the games very rewarding. “Challenging puzzles … engage players and make them feel accomplished when they complete a seemingly impossible task,” Parrott said.

Immersing Yourself

ARGs are always evolving, as the Puppetmasters discover new ways to deliver their content. And though the community is much more mainstream than it was ten years ago, Peters says it isn’t quite enough yet. “The next step is for [ARGs] to go mainstream in a big way,” Peters said. “What does a movie look like when it’s not limited to the screen?” But with the amount of media that we are inundated with, it’s difficult to tell the difference between a legitimate website and the beginning of a game. The easiest way to find a game to join, according to Erbs and Parrott, is to check out http://unfiction.com orhttp://argn.com.

“Go to the News & Rumors section of Unfiction.com and find a trailhead that looks promising,” Parrott said. And from there, as ARG players say, go down the rabbit hole.

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What else can we do with Alternate Reality Games?

scott — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 21:32:45 +0000

I just had a great phone conversation about Alternate Reality Gaming with Jake Kahle. In it we discussed that the majority of ARGs are being used to market video games, movies, tv, et cetera. But I’ve been thinking what else can we use them for? And since most of these ARGs are being run very large scale, can small businesses possibly get in on this new… tool? game? technique? life? So I thought of two different scenarios in which ARGs could be used to 1.) build community and ties 2.) be implemented by a small business

1.) The Secrets of the Omega Society:Where do most people today build a significant number of their life long connections? Colleges! So I thought why couldn’t a college especially during orientation, begin and run an ARG. The plot could surround a secret society (the Omega Society) known for having the best dorms, best seats at sport’s events, private galas, the top students, etc. (all kinds of good rumors to get students involved). The rabbit hole could be something like a clue in the orientation pamphlet (perhaps the secret societies’ symbol is a greek character Omega?) or perhaps, there is a website for students to log into to create a social profile for the university and located at the bottom is a link a la the Net. Maybe a short ‘home video’ style runs on campus tv at 1 am that is a student hiding in the omege societies lair (he gives his name which if payers look up takes them either to his facebook page, or to an article he wrote for the university 4 years ago on the society). Either way, the game should leave clues that require a range of different types of students to complete. There should be math clues to encourage those students to become involved, items placed near sporting equipment so those s inclined would see them. In addition, bury the various clues in the different orientation events in order to drive new students to these to build up attendance and traditional ice breaker techniques. Recruit different RAs, tourguides, freshman advisors, an even professors to act as puppet masters. The ARG would culminate in an initiation ceremony involving the winning team, and prizes awarded in the form of box seats to sporting events, a nice quad for Omega Society members. The nice thing about this one is that it could be possible to recruit one year’s winners to be the next year’s puppetmasters!

2. Secret of the Stolen Recipe: For this one we’ll go back to my first post about a small restaurant here in Missoula, MT. Here is a way for a small business to possibly run an ARG on their own. The rabbit hole for this one would be to place a new item on the restaurant menu, but have a piece of tape or something to look last minute placed over the item with a note saying: “due to unforeseen circumstances this menu item has been pulled”. Waiters/waitresses acting as puppetmasters if asked could vaguely reference someone trying to buy out the restaurant which if looked up would send to a social profile or perhaps a few fake ‘news’ sites talking about th same guy buying up buildings in the area, maybe there is a clue written in the bathrooms saying: “I know who has the recipe” with some some numbers scrawled below (the numbers lead to a GPS coordinate AND a google maps location both with a new clue of some kind). The idea is that this gentlemen is stole this prize winning (another hook!) recipe in order to keep the restaurant from earning a bunch more money so he could buy it for some nefarious purpose (perhaps to get to the hidden prohibition-era treasure hidden in the building?) The key here would be try and keep as many of the clues in the restaurant thus driving customers back to find out the next clue, and to involve LOCAL scenery and people as much as possible. The goal would be to generate more community feelings around the restaurant, increase brand awareness, and bring in new customers. Many of the clues would require man hours but little cost. Maybe paying for a po box to drive someone there, some URLS to create dummy pages, maybe a two day ad in the local paper, but that would be about it. And even those if done write could be cut out all together. The culmination of the game could be a date and time, along with the gps coordinates of the restaurant. The time would be for when the restaurant is not open, and whoever shows up with the correct password could be treated to a free sampling of the ‘stolen recipe’.

These are just two of the many different ways in which ARGs could be used in ways other than for tv, movies, and video games. The key is that people have fun. If you have any other ideas for innovative ways to use ARGs please, pass them along.

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Fantastic ARG Video

scott — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 22:36:48 +0000

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